The yogi's perspective
There is one thing on which Taoism, yoga, Buddhism, and Stoicism all agree: reality is a constant flow, and it cannot be stopped. What causes suffering is not life as it is. It is the refusal to accept life as it is.
Marcus Aurelius put it simply: what disturbs men is not things themselves, but what they think about them.
In practice, this means that suffering is largely self-generated. It is not the flow of life that hurts — it is the resistance to that flow that creates friction. And this is exactly what I work on in session.
The goal is not to directly eliminate pain. What I look for is the point of friction — where energy no longer flows, where it stagnates or agitates in disorder — and I restore the flow at that point.
What this produces: the person relaxes. The pain doesn't necessarily disappear all at once, but something settles. The body stops fighting against itself. The pain becomes manageable, and this is what opens the path to healing. The body knows how to repair itself; it just needs to be given the possibility.
Rebalancing an energetic friction point is helping the person let go of the cause of their discomfort. Not psychologically — energetically. The body understands something, and it releases.
I saw this happen with a client in Korea. He was suffering from knee pain that had prevented him from being mobile for six months. He was struggling against fears and intrusive thoughts that amplified each of his physical pains. During an in-person session, I felt many very limiting energetic blockages. His knee problem was absolutely somatic and rooted in the mind. In a single session, I treated the pain. Simply rebalancing the energy made him release all his fears and illusions. Two weeks later, he called to say he had been able to go hiking again, and he was extremely satisfied. In his surge of motivation, he had even managed to land a job, something he would never have thought possible in his state before the healing.
But sometimes, resistance is too strong. Another client, also in Korea and in person, despite an atmosphere completely oriented toward relaxation — music, pleasant smell, reclining chair — never managed to relax. He was very skeptical, and out of fear of really feeling something and questioning his certainties, he remained tense and closed to the session. I realized this in his energy, and he confirmed it when I asked if he had managed to relax. Although okay with the session, he resisted the possibility of evolving.
Science is beginning to seriously document these mechanisms — sources are at the bottom of this article.
Physical problems always have a form in the energetic field. Ailments appear when a living being goes against its nature. When someone lives durably in opposition to what they are — their values, their needs, their rhythm — it eventually registers somewhere in the body.
Science has documented this for decades: chronic stress and repressed emotions have direct biological effects. A study by Kaprio et al. (1987) published in the American Journal of Public Health followed 95,647 bereaved people and observed that all-cause mortality doubled in the week following the loss of a spouse — with an even more marked risk for heart disease, multiplied by 2.3 in men and 3.5 in women. A review published in BMC Psychiatry in 2023 (Orzechowska et al.) shows how retained emotions and inadequate emotional control concretely contribute to the appearance of physical symptoms in patients suffering from chronic somatic diseases. What the energetic tradition calls "going against one's nature," science translates as deep physiological dysregulation.
I recently worked with a client prone to panic attacks and anxiety. Work on the kidneys — linked to anxiety in holistic medicine — allowed him to completely let go of the subjects that would have brought him crises. The friction point was not where he felt the panic, but in the energetic terrain that supported his emotional reactivity.
The happiest people I have met — the most inspiring, those who have the most positive impact around them — are not those who have no hardships. They are people of great virtue. Gratitude, humility, sincere effort, acceptance of what is.
Cultivating these aspects profoundly changes the quality of life. The hardships that could have crushed the mood become light. Not because they are less difficult — but because one is in harmony with one's nature, and this harmony creates a resilience that nothing else can build in its place. The more one goes in this direction, the more change becomes something we welcome rather than something we fight against.
Positive psychology confirms this. Seligman showed in American Psychologist (2005) that actively practicing gratitude — notably the "three good things" exercise each evening for a week — produced measurable effects on happiness and depression, still present at six-month follow-up. Research using fMRI shows that writing gratitude letters durably modifies activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, strengthening neuronal sensitivity to gratitude three months after the beginning of the practice (Kini et al., NeuroImage, 2016).
And this echoes what the great traditions have taught for centuries: the human being who cultivates their virtues does not suffer less — but they traverse instead of remaining stuck. They stay in the flow.